When you write of A belief in human agency, it’s important to distinguish between the different conceptions of human agency on offer, corresponding to the 3 main political groups:
The openly religious or reactionary statists say that human agency should mean humans acting as the agents of God. (These are a subset of your fatalists. Other fatalists are generally apolitical.)
The covertly religious or progressivestatists say human agency can only mean humans acting as agents of the State (which has the moral authority and magical powers of God). This is partly because they think individual humans are powerless and/or stupid, and partly because, ontologically, they don’t believe individual humans exist, where to exist is to have an eternal Platonic Form. (Plato was notoriously vague on why each human has an individual soul, when every other category of thing in the world has only one collective category soul; and people in the Platonic line of thought have wavered back and forth over this for millenia.) This includes Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and the Social Justice movement.
The Nazis IMHO fall into both categories at the same time, showing how blurry and insignificant the lines between these 2 categories are. Most progressives are actually reactionaries, as most believe in the concept of “perfection”, and that perfection is the natural state of all things in the absence of evil actors, so that their “progress” is towards either a mythical past perfection in exactly the same way as that of the Nazis, or towards a perfection that was predestined at creation, as in left Hegelians such as Marxists and Unitarian Universalists.
The empiricists believe that individual humans can and should each have their own individual agency. (The reasons why empiricist epistemology is naturally opposed to statism is too complex for me to explain right now. It has to do with the kind of ontology that leads to statism being incompatible with empirical investigation and individual freedom, and opposition to individual freedom being incompatible with effective empirical investigation.)
Someone who wants us united under a document written by desert nomads 3000 years ago, or someone who wants the government to force their “solutions” down our throats and keep forcing them no matter how many people die, would also say they believe in human agency; but they don’t want private individuals to have agency.
This is a difficult but critical point. Big progressive projects, like flooding desert basins, must be collective. But movements that focus on collective agency inevitably embrace, if only subconsciously, the notion of a collective soul. This already happened to us in 2010, when a large part of the New Atheist movement split off and joined the Social Justice movement, and quickly came to hate free speech, free markets, and free thought.
I think it’s obvious that the enormous improvements in material living standards in the last ~200 years you wrote of was caused by the Enlightenment, and can be summarized as the understanding of how liberating individuals leads to economic and social progress. Whereas modernist attempts to deliberately cause economic and social progress are usually top-down and require suppressing individuals, and so cause the reverse of what they intend. This is the great trap that we must not fall into, and it hinges on our conception of human agency.
A great step forward, or backwards (towards Athens), was made by the founders of America when they created a nation based in part on the idea of competition and compromise as being good rather than bad, basically by applying Adam Smith’s invisible hand to both economics and politics. One way forward is to understand how to do large projects that have a noble purpose. That is, progressive capitalism. Another way would be to understand how governments have sometimes managed to do great things, like NASA’s Apollo project, without them degenerating into economic and social disasters like Stalin’s or Mao’s 5-Year-Plans. Either way, how you conceptualize human agency will be a decisive factor in whether you produce heaven or hell.
When you write of A belief in human agency, it’s important to distinguish between the different conceptions of human agency on offer, corresponding to the 3 main political groups:
The openly religious or reactionary statists say that human agency should mean humans acting as the agents of God. (These are a subset of your fatalists. Other fatalists are generally apolitical.)
The covertly religious or progressive statists say human agency can only mean humans acting as agents of the State (which has the moral authority and magical powers of God). This is partly because they think individual humans are powerless and/or stupid, and partly because, ontologically, they don’t believe individual humans exist, where to exist is to have an eternal Platonic Form. (Plato was notoriously vague on why each human has an individual soul, when every other category of thing in the world has only one collective category soul; and people in the Platonic line of thought have wavered back and forth over this for millenia.) This includes Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and the Social Justice movement.
The Nazis IMHO fall into both categories at the same time, showing how blurry and insignificant the lines between these 2 categories are. Most progressives are actually reactionaries, as most believe in the concept of “perfection”, and that perfection is the natural state of all things in the absence of evil actors, so that their “progress” is towards either a mythical past perfection in exactly the same way as that of the Nazis, or towards a perfection that was predestined at creation, as in left Hegelians such as Marxists and Unitarian Universalists.
The empiricists believe that individual humans can and should each have their own individual agency. (The reasons why empiricist epistemology is naturally opposed to statism is too complex for me to explain right now. It has to do with the kind of ontology that leads to statism being incompatible with empirical investigation and individual freedom, and opposition to individual freedom being incompatible with effective empirical investigation.)
Someone who wants us united under a document written by desert nomads 3000 years ago, or someone who wants the government to force their “solutions” down our throats and keep forcing them no matter how many people die, would also say they believe in human agency; but they don’t want private individuals to have agency.
This is a difficult but critical point. Big progressive projects, like flooding desert basins, must be collective. But movements that focus on collective agency inevitably embrace, if only subconsciously, the notion of a collective soul. This already happened to us in 2010, when a large part of the New Atheist movement split off and joined the Social Justice movement, and quickly came to hate free speech, free markets, and free thought.
I think it’s obvious that the enormous improvements in material living standards in the last ~200 years you wrote of was caused by the Enlightenment, and can be summarized as the understanding of how liberating individuals leads to economic and social progress. Whereas modernist attempts to deliberately cause economic and social progress are usually top-down and require suppressing individuals, and so cause the reverse of what they intend. This is the great trap that we must not fall into, and it hinges on our conception of human agency.
A great step forward, or backwards (towards Athens), was made by the founders of America when they created a nation based in part on the idea of competition and compromise as being good rather than bad, basically by applying Adam Smith’s invisible hand to both economics and politics. One way forward is to understand how to do large projects that have a noble purpose. That is, progressive capitalism. Another way would be to understand how governments have sometimes managed to do great things, like NASA’s Apollo project, without them degenerating into economic and social disasters like Stalin’s or Mao’s 5-Year-Plans. Either way, how you conceptualize human agency will be a decisive factor in whether you produce heaven or hell.